There was an energy in the atmosphere that night as Todoroki Shoto started his patrol. This was not that unusual, not for the part of the city he was assigned to. Musutafu was normal on the surface, but things happened in back alleys all the time. People disappeared, people died, villains found the newest victims to torment. And it was also where The Forest typically worked.

Shoto wasn't sure what to think of the vigilante that had appeared on the scene five years before. They were mysterious and rarely ever seen. No one had managed to get enough of a glimpse to even determine gender, and this was unsettling for most of the hero community. Shoto's own father—who Shoto had been studiously avoiding for three years now—was of the opinion that the only good vigilante was captured and in prison, if not dead. The only reason Shoto knew this was because Endeavor was very vocal about the matter on several forums.

The Underground heroes were largely caught somewhere in the middle like he was. Aizawa-sensei had mentioned that several underground heroes were petitioning to get them an official license if they were ever caught. Shoto had known enough about his teacher by then to guess that his signature was one of those on the petition, if not the one who started it in the first place. Aizawa-sensei always was one of the heroes that least liked wasted potential.

And there was little doubt in anyone's mind that the Forest had potential. They typically worked with information, gathering and forwarding enough evidence for the police to make an arrest or the heroes to act on a plot before something big happened. Around when they first started working, they were the main source of information on the League of Villains. Because of their involvement in the case, a lot of things went a lot better than they could have. While Shoto still had a few nightmares about the USJ incident, he knew that everything after that would have been worse if not for the flow of information keeping the League of Villains constantly on the back foot.

Of course, then there was the Stain incident. He came late to that one, but apparently the Forest had been tracking him for a while. Iida had briefly met the vigilante in Hosu. And by "briefly", Iida had been knocked out from behind when he tried hunting the Hero-Killer and woke up to a note pinned to the front of his costume explaining all the reasons why trying to track Stain was a stupid idea and a detriment to his brother's legacy. Stain himself had been caught that night officially by a couple of heroes, including Endeavor. Unofficially, well, his father ranted for weeks after the incident about the Forest. Apparently, Stain was the only one who could probably tell anyone anything definitive about them and he wasn't talking, which was just a further black mark against them in Endeavor's eyes.

Shoto wandered the rooftops, peering down into alleys as he passed, half-distracted by his thoughts. Everything was quiet, which admittedly wasn't exactly a bad sign, but most of Shoto's so-called quiet nights went to shit before too long.

As quietly as he could, Shoto shifted closer, trying not to draw attention to himself.

"This the place?" one asked, slouching over with his hand in his pockets. "Middle of that fucking vigi's area?"

"Fuck you," another muttered. "Word on the street is he's in Hosu dealing with that rash of kidnappings. Lotta heroes got pulled over for that. Including Eraserhead, so vigi's gotta be there too."

"And you don't think they have some of their spy shit left behind?"

The confident one shook his head. "Nah, quirk like that's gotta have a limit. And we got somebody who can scramble any recordings in the room. No listening in for the vigi."

Shoto wondered if what the thug was implying was true. If Eraserhead was working more directly with them, surely he would have mentioned it? Of course, it had been a few months since he had run into his teacher, so there were probably a few things he had missed out on. If the Forest was going to work more directly with heroes, Aizawa-sensei was a good person to start with.

The guy at the head of the group waved them into a building, glancing back warily to see if they were being followed. Shoto was fairly confident that he hadn't been seen.

The building was a fairly standard warehouse in the Musutafu area. There were twelve more like it in the surround four block radius, and that was probably the appeal of the area. If no one knew which warehouse the meeting was going to take place, then they would have more time to prepare for heroes or the police to show up.

Of course, being a fairly standard warehouse, it also had weak security points that Shoto didn't feel guilty about exploiting at all. Especially when it sounded like there was a big yakuza meeting going on inside. He paused before entering the building. They said they had someone who could scramble recordings, so he thought it best to air on the side of caution and assume that they could scramble electronics in general.

Running a mental tally of who would probably be in the area, Shoto shot off a text to Aoyama.

Recon 465G, 30 minutes. If black, code 3.

He waited for the response. While he wasn't typically one for running underground missions, Aizawa-sensei made damn sure everyone knew the protocols. 'Recon' explained the situation he was going into and '465' was the hero shorthand for yakuza. The 'G' addendum indicated the possible scale of the situation—a joint yakuza meeting from the sounds of it—so he wasn't going to be sending in anyone blind. 'Black' was the shorthand for 'if I don't get back to you' and 'code 3' was a general rally call that emphasized the need for medical attention. Shoto wasn't dumb enough to think that if he couldn't get back to Aoyama in the time it wouldn't mean he was sporting severe injuries at the very least. At worst, he'd be dead, and they still needed a medical professional on site to call it.

Not that he intended to die or get caught. But it was one of those nights, so he wasn't about to take any chances.

Confirm. Location?

Shoto sent off the address of the warehouse and waited for another confirmation before he slipped the phone into his pocket. His point of entry was a window to one of the upper offices. Oiling the hinges, the window eased open without so much as a groan, and Shoto was once again glad of the standard night gear he carried. It wasn't as though the belt affected his quirk in any way. The belt was cold resistant to some of the lowest temperatures he could safely generate, and a little beyond. When overuse of his quirk could send him into hypothermia, he was glad for every piece of support equipment that made him slippery as well as stupidly powerful. Any trick that made him less likely to die in combat—and consequently also pissed off Endeavor—was wonderful. He wasn't the Number One Hero, but that was more his father's dream than his. Shoto was already proving that he could handle himself without his father's fire, and that was perfectly fine with him.

"—the weight of what you are suggesting?" one of the yakuza below shrieked.

A calmly impassive voice rose above the ensuing chatter. "Of course I realize the potential consequences of such a course of action. I would not have suggested it if I had not considered this matter from as many sides as possible."

There was something darkly dangerous about the person, and Shoto wanted a face to go with it. He pulled up his hood to hide his rather distinct and noticeable hair before creeping around the upper level until he came to one of the support beams. A thick metal I-beam, thankfully, which made climbing just a little bit easier. It wasn't unlike trying to navigate through the upper levels of the earthquake city in the Unforeseen Simulations Joint. For as helpful as ice could be, it wasn't the best building material in an earthquake and Shoto had needed to learn to adapt or fail the simulation. And he refused to fail.

The cross beams in the rafters were also I-beams, narrower, but still manageable. He slotted himself in the shadows of a couple support joists and settled in to watch.

Shoto was glad he'd sent '465G' to Aoyama. There were at least fifty people below, four known yakuza leaders and their entourage, as well as an unknown man and his people. Even before the man continue speaking, Shoto could tell that he was the most dangerous person in the room.

He looked fairly average, with long dark hair pulled back into a tail that stretched down his back and dark flashing eyes like black holes. His skin was weathered, but not overly so. He wore a tailored suit that looked a little bulky for his proportions, but not so much it was obvious. Likely body-armor or something similar added in the tailoring process. A pair of scars ran along the cheek bone, old and pale, but still visible against his dark skin. There was a ring on the third finger of his left hand with some sort of insignia Shoto was too far away to see.

He was flanked on one side by a woman with wine-red hair and a pair of swords strapped across her back. She studied the room with a careful intent as though she were waiting for someone to make a stupid move. On the other side stood a giant of a man, his arms and legs easily four times as thick as Shoto's own, and a head to match. The woman looked practically waifish beside him, but no less intimidating. For the giant's weapons, though, he held a sledgehammer of all things, and it looked like a toy in his hands. There were a few more in the dangerous man's entourage, but none so highly placed as the two on either side of him.

"You see, heroes, contrary to what all of you think, are excellent for business." A shiver of something went down Shoto's spine as he listened. "What better way, after all, to recruit to our numbers than to point out the world as it is to the already disenfranchised. Even with Lemillion as the Symbol of Peace, even with all these heroes debuting every day, the crime of the world does not stop. People do not stop needing food in their bellies, a place to call home, companionship, pleasure..."

Shoto was liking this man less and less with every word he spoke.

"What better way to gather people than let the heroes drive them to us themselves? After all, what has Kamui Woods done lately that has helped some struggling mother? What has Mt. Lady done for a young man struggling to survive on the streets? Why must Midnight send thieves to prison when they are only stealing to sustain themselves and those who rely on them?"

The yakuza were a captive audience and there was an aura of awe in the air.

As well as the smell of something sweet and cloying.

Shoto dragged up his filter to cover his nose and mouth. The dangerous man had an emitter quirk of some kind, a pheromone that probably induced suggestibility and simply added to his natural charisma. And he had been pouring it into the room until the air was filled with it. Several members of the yakuza were swaying where they stood, glazed looks of awe and interest on their faces. Some of the most powerful figures of the underworld and they were shifting in place like charmed snakes.

The snake charmer smiled. Shoto could see the deep lines of it even from above and, worse, it was an expression he recognized. Cruel vindication. He had seen it enough on his father's face on the rare occasions Shoto couldn't keep his fire from reacting. His rage was buried beneath the glaciers he controlled, but sometimes even that wasn't enough to keep it down and it exploded out of him. And every damn time, Endeavor looked at him as if he'd won.

Was it any wonder Shoto had cut off contact the day he turned 18?

This man was just as dangerous as Endeavor, but it was obvious his sights weren't set on the status of the Number One Hero. From the sound of it, he wanted to exploit the hero structure as it stood, creating more villains from the desperation of people the heroes were meant to save. And loathe as he was to admit it, perhaps the man had a point that the heroes somehow managed to create their own villains.

This, however, ... This was the ideological successor to the Hero-Killer Stain, the other side of that coin that focused on making the villains rather than culling the corrupt heroes. Not that he believed any of the heroes mentioned were corrupt.

He needed to do something about this before something bigger happened.

His first move was to freeze the floor and the legs of everyone in the vicinity. His second was to drop out of the rafters and into the midst of the yakuza where he could use more delicate moves to keep people trapped.

"Ah, a hero. Of course." The snake charmer didn't even look surprised, which Shoto took for the warning it was, drawing on more of his ice to prepare for another attack. "Kill him."

The one saving grace in that moment was that not all of the yakuza could break free of his ice. The dangerous man could not, but clearly he didn't need to with a literal army charmed by him. His own entourage, for whatever reason, were either immune to the charm or so completely held in thrall that long exposure let them maintain their sense of being. There wasn't much he could expect from them other than the fight he had already thrown himself into. The man's entourage was, without exception even when one had a reptilian quirk of some sort, able to get free and took charge of the now loyal followers.

Which meant Shoto was fighting a one-man war. Fuck.

The woman with red hair and swords practically threw herself at him, drawing the blades in an instant. They ignited into flame an instant after that and while Shoto would never be grateful to Endeavor for the abuse disguised as training, he did manage to take one thing from it: how to dodge fire, even if it's coming from multiple directions.

There were several people with fire quirks present. One breathed fire at him and Shoto managed to leap over it with a sharp blast of ice from his feet. While still airborne, he launched a bullet of ice at the man's chest. Fire breathers typically needed to maintain a certain temperature of core warmth to keep up their fire. A temperature imbalance could cause the fire to be much weaker than normal, and Shoto was distantly glad the bullet hit home, and frost spilled across the man's chest. He fell back coughing.

On instinct more than anything else, a pair of ice blades formed on his feet just before he touched down. He used the excess momentum from the landing to spin away from a guy with a speed quirk who had managed to vibrate his legs fast enough to melt out of the ice through friction. It seemed to be slightly detrimental to his health, though, as he was shaking more than he should on the ice, and Shoto was fairly certain it wasn't from the cold.

The presence of a warm body near him made Shoto duck low enough to brush the ice with his hand. A flaming sword, wielded by the strange red-haired woman, sliced through the air where his shoulders had been mere moments before. Her aura and the use of a few other flame quirks in the vicinity was starting to melt a lot of the ice, so Shoto used the moment of contact to refreeze everything and buy himself another couple of breaths before the small army attacked again.

The woman merely crashed through the ice barrier with her other sword, which was also still on fire. The fire breather he'd hit was down for the count, though, as Shoto pushed off enough to jump the ice-encased obstacle in his way. He was never more grateful to Fuyumi for the secret ice-skating classes she'd taken him to than right now.

He transitioned into a spin that sent an elbow into the face of a man who could inflate his limbs. He stumbled, and Shoto folded a dome of ice spikes over him. Bigger limbs would only mean bigger wounds and either way it would take him out of the fight.

The giant of a man stomped his foot and the ice cracked in a spiderweb out from the impact. Shoto wasn't able to outrun the cracks and the blade of his ice skates tripped him up. He turned the tumble into a handspring that reinforced the ice again, this time with spikes radiating out to control the approach vectors of the remaining villains. His landing wasn't the best. The ice blades nearly cracked under him and would have if he hadn't reinforced them just before hitting the ice. Still, the landing jarred his ankle enough to send a shooting pain up his leg.

As always, he pushed through it. But he wouldn't be landing on that ankle first for the rest of the fight if he could help it.

Glancing back, a few of the villains had careened into the ice spikes, unable to stop themselves on a surface with less friction than they were used to. Snake Charmer, for lack of a better name at the moment, was encased in ice up to his waist. He didn't look annoyed or like he thought he was in any particular danger. Which, since his main bodyguards were still in the fight, he probably thought everything was fine. Shoto was, after all, just one hero.

Time was getting away from him, and he wasn't sure when the half-hour he'd allotted himself would be up. Probably not for a while. Part of Shoto was hoping Aoyama would be in the area before the half-hour was up, just in case. Especially since this was a 465G and his luck was not the best. Even one more person would be helpful at the moment.

A dart of some sort zipped through his peripheral vision and he curved, trying to put one of the darter's allies between him and them. He picked the giant, who was far larger than him, and would provide excellent cover. And who was also currently stomping on the spikes in his way. Fuck. Time for something a little more drastic and a lot more draining.

Shoto stamped his foot, letting the blade crumble away momentarily while he erected a thick wall of ice between the giant and him. The wall was mostly transparent and some of the remaining villains were already trying to get around it, including the one who looked like a poison dart frog. Shoto pushed off with the now bare foot, reforming the blade before his foot touched the ice again.

It was snowing inside. He hadn't done that since...

That was a very bad sign, and if Aizawa-sensei found out about this, he was not going to let Shoto get out of remedial quirk training. Snow, especially when he wasn't trying to make it snow inside, was a sign that he was overexerting himself. Which meant he was in the beginning stages of hypothermia and the passive warmth of his fire half wasn't able to counteract it fast enough. He needed to wrap this up quickly before he wasn't able to fight anymore. And that meant pushing himself and his ice more.

The giant punched at the thick sheet of ice and it cracked under the impact but didn't shatter. There was no damage to his fist that Shoto could see, so he probably had thicker skin. That was almost a certainty with how easily he had crashed over the ice spikes. So hardened skin of some sort. Shouldn't be that hard to deal with. Kirishima could harden his skin, but there were always places that couldn't be hardened by much, and Shoto had learned to exploit those weaknesses in sparring matches. The joints, the neck, anywhere that needed more delicate movements or a range of motion that would be difficult with thicker skin would be ideal places to attack.

As the giant reared back to punch the ice again, Shoto arced around and punched at it first, blasting the wall back towards the giant and the others behind him. It exploded outward, shattering into spikes that knocked down several of the lesser parties. The giant managed to get an arm up to shield his face, but it left his armpit vulnerable. Shoto pressed this advantage, darting in close to drive slivers of ice into the giant's skin where they would disable his arm before swinging around and driving an ice-reinforced hand into a particular spot on the back of the man's neck. The giant dropped like a stone and Shoto encased him in much thicker ice than before should he wake up before the battle was over.

The woman with the fire swords launched herself at him with a cry of rage and Shoto barely managed to dart away. She seemed to be the last fire quirk standing. The temperature shift was starting to affect the people with reptilian quirks, as the one from Snake Charmer's entourage was sluggish and sleepy. The poison dart frog person was also starting to waver, though they were still moving toward him and firing off a dart every few moments or so. Nothing nearly as fast as before, but still mildly concerning. Shoto didn't want to know what would happen if he was hit with one of the darts. Being a member of the yakuza, he had to assume they had a paralytic at the very least, and he was already operating at less than his best.

He shot a blast of ice toward the darter, another ice bullet that would hopefully turn the tide for the better here. The darter attempted to dodge, but the ice still managed to clip them in the side, sending them spinning across the ice. They rammed into one of the support beams and stopped moving.

Shoto forced another wave of ice into the floor, capturing the sluggish reptilians and amphibians while also growing the ice around the other trapped yakuza. Now the ice had encased the Snake Charmer's arms, and he was starting to look annoyed. Still not afraid, though. He could probably tell that Shoto was flagging for all that he was trying to hide it. It was difficult to hide his violent shivering, but at least he wasn't going to be the only person with hypothermia at the end of this. The one good part about his fire half was that he was never going to get frostbite. The same didn't apply to anyone else.

Shoto turned his attention back to the woman with the flaming swords. She had only managed to use fire through the swords. She radiated heat, but the only fire she emitted was through something else. Hopefully if he separated her from her swords, she wouldn't have fire to use at all, just heat which was much easier to deal with. Unfortunately, the cold wasn't affecting her as much as it was affecting him.

He sent a blast of ice towards her hands to test his hypothesis. She deflected it, but the impact still made her falter a bit and the fire along the blade flickered as she nearly lost her grip. Perfect.

He immediately went on the counter offensive. If he couldn't knock the swords out of her hands, the next logical step was to get in close enough to knock her out. Like the giant, she was much too dangerous to keep awake. And even if all she did was radiate heat without her swords, she was still capable of escaping and melting any ice prison he attempted to create. He sent blasts of ice at her as quickly as he could form them in his hand, going for quantity and speed rather than quality. With as slow as he was starting to get, he didn't think he could manage quality.

She attempted to deflect them, holding her ground in a circle of melted ice. It was simple enough for him to circle and keep circling, to keep her constantly turning in place to counter him. Her wild swings had to be tiring her out and he could see as they were gradually getting slower. He just needed to outlast her, and it would all be over. He would call Aoyama in with as many heroes and police as he could gather, and he could turn the lot of them over before getting treated for his hypothermia. He just needed to last longer than her.

One blast tore a flaming sword from her hand and the fire winked out like a snuffed candle. The constant spinning was making the woman dizzy, too, as she was starting to stumble over her feet. Seeing his chance, Shoto charged her, turning aside the arm with the flaming sword with his left while he punched with his right hand. A satisfying crunch under his fist told him he'd broken her nose. She stumbled back, dropping the other sword, which also went out before it landed in the puddle she'd created.

Shoto pressed his advantage, moving close again to aim a kick at her head. She managed to block it, but she was off balance now, clearly reaching the extent of her adrenaline as he was starting to. She buckled when he managed to land a kick in her side, and he followed it up with an elbow strike to the base of her skull. The woman dropped like a broken doll.

He wanted to stumble back, to let his fatigue take over, but he needed to stay on guard lest someone sneak up on him and attack. He turned in a quick circle, surveying the room. No one was moving. Most of his assailants were trapped in ice or bleeding sluggishly or, in the case of the Snake Charmer's bodyguards, knocked unconscious. Unless someone was hiding in the shadows, there was no one else to fight.

Still on guard, Shoto moved to the entrance that would lead out into the alley. He needed to assume that whatever quirk was causing the dampening field was still in effect and make the call from outside. The warmer night air flooded his senses as he stepped outside. He didn't feel any better yet, but he hadn't realized how cold he'd made the warehouse until he was out of it.

His vision blurred and he reached out for the wall as a wave of dizziness swept over him. Reaching into his pocket, he tried to wrap his hand around his phone as tightly as possible. He couldn't really feel his fingers at the moment to tell how tight that was.

Something clattered to the ground and Shoto managed to focus on his empty hand before his sluggish brain suggested that he would find his phone on the ground next to his foot. Sure enough, there it was, screen side down. He bent to pick it up. His clumsy fingers managed to close over it. Probably too tight this time from the way he could see the phone digging into the pads of his fingers, but it didn't matter.

As he tried to straighten, a wave of dizziness more intense than the last knocked him on his ass, and he just kept going until he was sprawled out on the concrete, barely able to move.

The screen was cracked. He registered this distantly as he tried to make it work. The screen was cracked, and the display wasn't working the way it was supposed to. It lit up brokenly, kaleidoscopic fragments of color spilled across a shattered mirror where nothing looked like anything and his brain was too fuzzy to try and parse it out.

There were footsteps in the alley, and he hoped it was Aoyama. He didn't have the energy to look or call out, much less fight if it was an enemy. He just wanted to sleep because the adrenaline that had kept him going through the fight had long since abandoned him, and he wasn't sure he was going to be leaving the alley anytime soon on anything other than a stretcher.

Shoto made his peace with the fact that Aizawa-sensei was going to kick his ass in remedial quirk training and let himself drift.

Fun fact: I wasn't in this fandom three months ago. Another fun fact: I haven't actually read more than 10 chapters of the manga or watched a single episode of the anime. I got into this fandom through the fanfiction because someone I follow on Tumblr started talking about AUs. If this is your first encounter with my writing, congratulations because you might get steadier updates since this is what my muse wants to focus on and I already have 7 chapters written.